Political Scene: The Future of Occupy Wall Street

“It’s hard to say how the hell they feel, isn’t it?” Hendrik Hertzberg says of Occupy Wall Street. On this week’s Political Scene podcast, John Cassidy, Amy Davidson, and Hertzberg join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what’s become of O.W.S. and how politicians are responding.

In New York City, protesters have been evacuated from Zuccotti Park, and are facing increasingly forceful police. (Philip Gourevitch has more in Daily Comment.) Hertzberg doesn’t think that the evacuation has helped Mayor Bloomberg:

Even if you posit that at some point the occupiers had to be gotten out of Zuccotti Park, or at least the whole campsite thing had to be dismantled, this whole “Mission: Impossible,” helicopter, Klieg-light approach to it was excessive and it showed a lack of P.R. sense.

The evacuation is also a loss for the occupiers:

What they had in place of a leader or leaders was a spot, a place. And they could have their General Assembly meeting. And they could kind of vaguely move in a direction together because they had this mechanism to make decisions…. What’s the mechanism now? Where’s the headquarters? How can it make decisions at all?

For Cassidy, though, “the great strength of the movement is that it’s outside the political process to some extent and forces the politicians to react to it,” he says.

They all agree that O.W.S., as Davidson says, “has defused the strength of that accusation that the Democrats are engaging in class warfare and that Americans don’t want to hear about class. It turns out that they actually are interested in that question about who has what power and what economics has to do with it.”

“If Obama can’t make hay with that, you start to despair for a progressive politician,” Cassidy says.